The American Way of Killing

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Malcolm Gladwell’s most urgent book yet: a provocative investigation of America’s epidemic of gun violence.

The United States has far more homicides than any of its peers around the world. Why?

In this groundbreaking book, Malcolm Gladwell explores the American “peculiarity”—how the world’s wealthiest country came to suffer from a problem typically only seen in the world’s poorest countries.

Drawing on original interviews, archival and social science research, and his trademark insight, Gladwell approaches the American paradox through a series of stories. What can we learn from the miracle of a young gunshot victim in Washington, D.C.? How have the legal troubles of a seventeenth-century English knight influenced American attempts at gun control? Why would a European police chief be baffled by the graduation ceremony at any American police academy?

In a sweeping narrative, Gladwell travels from a shooting range in North Carolina, to the South Side of Chicago, to an old plantation house in Alabama, painting a picture of a country that does not understand its most pressing social problem, and as result, does not understand how to fix it. 

• “Malcolm Gladwell is one of America’s foremost chroniclers of curious social phenomena and what’s behind them.”
  TIME
• “[Gladwell] is a driver of the cultural conversation for many years now, challenging what we think we know about our most deeply held beliefs…I read this book in one sitting. My eyes were opened in ways I didn’t even expect.”
  Oprah Winfrey
• “As usual, Gladwell takes our previously conceived notions, challenges them, and makes us think.”
  Katie Couric
• “You can think of Malcolm Gladwell as a genre unto himself.”
  David Remnick, The New Yorker
• "Eye-opening…At every turn in this arresting, informative, and invaluable inquiry, Gladwell reveals hidden realities and contrasts honest versus dishonest discourse.”
  Booklist
• “A characteristically wide-ranging exploration of why the U.S. is such a deadly place…A lucid argument for rethinking our approach to firearms.”
  Kirkus Reviews